Aside from being contacted by a family member or maybe some sort of contact information being left in a will, how do you discover if someone you know has died?
You’re trying to find out if she’s ghosting you or just a ghost?
Clever haha
Fortunately no, it’s just a hypothetical for now. But I’ve been thinking about it for a while in regards to old friends that I don’t keep up with.
Google their name. If they are deceased and not famous, chances are that the top results would include their obituary.
If they’re famous: From the news.
If they’re family: Other family.
If they’re friends: Hopefully other friends or their family.
If they’re a stranger: I don’t, unless their story ends up on the news or as a movie or something. 🤷🏻♂️
At 4 AM, bleary-eyed, answering a phone call from my mother (the second time she’d tried) to be told that my father probably can’t hear words anymore but that she’d put it on speakerphone in case I had any words to speak before the life support was removed.
His condition went from stable and active to on the edge of death within a few hours. He had (mostly) survived three separate bouts of cancer and the most one was in remission (we’d all flown out a few years prior for the extremely risky surgery needed to counter the last bout).
I don’t think anyone learns about a sudden death in a particularly graceful way. If you want your loved ones to have more than a day’s advance notice euthanasia is pretty much your only option.
The authorities will try to notify someone in the immediate family (often the spouse). After that, if you are in their estate, the trustee should make a good faith effort to contact you. Beyond that, it’s normally just friends and family contacting each other.
Back in the days when printed newspapers were common, some folks would check the obituaries regularly.
You could create a Google alert. If the stupid thing actually works, you should get an email when their obituary gets posted somewhere.
Back in the days when printed newspapers were common, some folks would check the obituaries regularly.
Always hoping to find your arch nemesis in there 😅
Ever heard of obituaries? Daily listings of people who have died.
Not everyone gets an obituary. Most of the people I know who died didn’t get one, or if they did it was in a small town newspaper thousands of miles away where they grew up instead of where they lived their adult life and died.
That makes me sad. Online obituaries are cheap and easy these days.
Search their name and where they’re from/living, I guess? Add “obituary” to get specifically death notices.
I don’t know if it works or how well, yet… but I’m sure I’ll find out sooner than I’d like.
This is how I found out a couple of my old acquaintances had passed. I searched them up and found their death notices.
On the other hand, I have a friend with whom I made a pact to notify our respective families if we start to go down because we care but are not in regular contact.
There’s a disturbance in the force.
You can’t know unless someone tells you or you go seek this information yourself. Another way besides contacting people or looking for an obituary is lurk on social media, if you know that person’s relatives and friends you may find some kind of mention or post about it. That is, if they also have you as a contact or if they make the post public.
Figures. So for online friends you’re pretty much hopeless?
Unless you have shared connections or know who they are to search for an obit, yes.
When my best friend, that I had met online but we also got together in real life, killed himself, his mother called me to let me know. I in turn got in touch with as many of our old EverQuest and World of Warcraft friends as I could to let them know.
